The what game: What color is this crayon? Black. What else is black? Jill. Besides Jill. Hair. Not my hair. Hair. What about just outside the window, Han? Sky. What kind of sky? Night. And what do we do at night? Story time.
“We also sleep,” Jeremy said.
He hadn’t recently.
Anagrams are the technique. Wright and Lawrence had met at least once, or Wright was making up the Cain-Lawrence connection. Wright and Lawrence had met at least once, and Wright had confected the Cain-Lawrence connection. Cain-Lawrence, it mattered or it didn’t. But Alexandra, her brother.
“Story time, Baba,” Han said.
Once upon a time, there was a man named Nathanael and his beautiful fiancée Klara. But he fell in love with a doll called Olimpia. He did not know her limbs were wooden. He did not know that when people stared it was because they knew he was a fool. Then one day, Nathanael saw Olimpia’s eyes on the floor, and he was thrown from his madness. It seemed for a time that he would recover. But one day, he looked in his spyglass at Klara, and the sight drove him to hurt her. In his madness, he cast himself to his death.
And once upon a time, a man named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn threw a log into a fire. He did not know that the log had rotted, that it was full of ants. The ants poured out into the flames. They were burning up, squirming in pain, and they fled the fire for the cool sand of the fireplace. But then, as Aleksandr watched, they began to circle, circle, circle in the sand, distraught. They began to return to their home, though there, it was certain they would be eaten up by hot flames.